When visiting a website, most people naturally gravitate their attention towards fascinating color and high-quality imagery. It is these elements which grab the attention of the visitor and helps in the retention for more extended period of time. A harmonious blend of colorful images, high-contrast colors and exceptional placement of content always helps to levitate the readers’ minds and to create brand value.
Personally, I love to visit websites with vivid imagery and unique color palette. It’s something that evokes attention, and it surely is true for most other people. When people notice the photo, people perceive the quality of the image to be synonymous to the brand, and this prompts their interactions to the website. This is why you’ll always find that the top brands use colorful imagery to grab their customer’s attention.
How To Choose The Right Photo?
As I’ve previously mentioned, high-quality imagery provokes a unique brand value that grabs the attention of the customers. Apart from the attention-grabbing ability, choosing the right photo can make a significant difference when you’re aiming to your targeted audience.
Let’s now look into some of the basics that you must remember to choose the perfect photo for your website:
Quality Matters
When choosing photo which goes according to your design concept, you must make sure that you’re choosing a high-resolution and sharp photo. Visitors often correlate the quality of the picture to the quality of your product or service, which is why it is essential that you opt for something that looks pleasant to the eye.
Know The Purpose
When finding the photo, be sure to know the purpose for which you’ll be using it for. This will mean that you’ll get the photos that serve the purpose, be it creating brand awareness, prompting people to take action or just creating a good vibe.
Strive For Originality
Visitors to your websites maybe fairly accustomed to the online world, which is why choosing a stock photo can create a bad impression to your visitors. This is why you should always choose something original, or something that looks as if it’s original. You can choose a candid photo, or just click some photos all by yourself using your phone. This lets the customers get accustomed to your company.
Be Consistent
When you’re finding the right photos for your website, you must make sure that all of the photos used in the websites add up to make up a story. If you look into the top-rated websites, most of them feature a unique set of photos that makes them stand out from the rest. If you add all the photos to a canvas, you’ll see a trend that they tried to create to appeal to their customers.
Where To Find The Right Photos?
With the surge of free resources, the availability of high-quality imagery has been easier than ever. While images have become a vital component for online content nowadays, the search for the perfect photos has always remained a pain. All of the images published over the web has a license, which protects the intellectual property from being used without compensation. Currently, you will find four main types of licensing for photos. These are:
Public Domain
These are the photos in which the intellectual property rights have already been expired, or the owner has released them to the public free of charge. These photos, therefore, can be used for any purposes including personal and commercial.
Creative Commons
This licensing is done either to protect the original photo or to give credits to the owner when the images are used. You can use these images for most purposes, but you must credit the owner for the photo.
Royalty-Free
These are the photos which require a one-time payment. Once you purchase the image, you don’t have to credit the owner, nor do you have to give the owner royalty every time you use the image.
Rights-Managed
This particular licensing allows us to use the image for a limited number of times, and once we’ve surpassed the frequency of use, we will need to pay for the license.
So, where to find the right photos for your websites?
There are a few options that you can try, which includes both free and paid images. Let’s look into some of the free sources from which you can find the perfect photo for your website:
Free Sources For Amazing Images
While there are hundreds, if not thousands, of websites offering excellent images for free, there are certainly some websites which have an extensive collection of free high-resolution images available to us. Let’s look at some of them.
Unsplash
Unsplash is one of the best websites from which you can find high-quality images taken by highly talented photographers. Personally, this is one of my favorite places from where I can get meaningful images that can attract people. While some images may be free, some may require you to credit the owner.
500px
500px has one of the largest collection of unique and attractive images in the world. The wide array of free images definitely surpasses Unsplash and features the trendy images in high-resolution. Although you will find free images on 500px, most of the images are up on sale and you will have to buy the image in order to use it. However, it’s truly a worthwhile investment given the fact that you’re getting such amazing images.
Rawpixel
If you are looking for photos for your business, Rawpixel might be the ideal place for you. Rawpixel has a limited collection of free images, but the images featured in Rawpixel portrays a definitive meaning. This is particularly important from small to medium businesses, where you want to convey a message to your customers. This is why Rawpixel is one of the best sources that you can use for finding the perfect photo for your website.
Wikimedia Commons
If you’re to get free-to-use images, Wikimedia Commons can be a great website to visit. It is an online repository of free images, sounds and other media files. The website contains a large collection of images, which is why it is more certain that you will get the images you’re searching for. The website, however, may not contain images that convey a definitive meaning. Instead the images are
Pexels
Similar to Unsplash, Pexels is another excellent website where you can find amazing free-to-use images. The images featured in the platform portrays a meaning, and you can easily find the perfect image from their vast collection of images. Top websites often visit Pexels to find the best images available.
Flickr
Flickr is an online community where talented photographers from all over the world shares their photos. These photos are free to use, and you can use them for any purpose you like. The images featured in the platform are of high-resolution and can portray a meaning to the targeted audience. The best thing about the platform is that you’ll get to know deeper insights into the photos, including the camera in which the photo was clicked, the aperture, focal length, exposure time, ISO and a lot of other information that may be relevant.
Paid Sources You Can Try
While you’ll get a wide array of excellent images on the websites mentioned above, there are no alternatives in purchasing an image. In such paid websites, you’ll find the best photos clicked by prominent photographers all around the world. Let’s look at some of the best websites where you can purchase high-end photographs and images for your website.
Getty Images
If you’re looking for a royalty-free image for your website, chances are that you will find the perfect photo that suits the purpose in Getty Images. It is considered to be the world’s best photo library, and you can get excellent creative stock photos, high-resolution images and vector art illustration all at the same platform.
Shutterstock
Similar to Getty Images, Shutterstock is another prominent photo library website. The website features excellent royalty-free images, creative stock photos, vi
deos and even music. The images featured in the website are of high-quality and follows the recent trend in the market. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking images for your personal blog or your commercial website, you’ll surely find the perfect photo that matches with the theme in Shutterstock.
Alamy
With over 150 million stock images, Alamy offers a wide range of excellent stock photos for you to choose from. The website features a wide range of royalty-free images clicked by photographers from all over the world. You can find all sorts of images, including the recent trends and images with a deeper meaning. Top businesses and websites prefer Alamy mainly due to the unparalleled aesthetics of each images.
What Next?
Once you’ve found out the perfect photo for your website, it is recommended that you follow the image with exceptional content that retains the customer’s attention. This ensures that you portray a greater brand value to the customer, so the customer perceives the quality to be synonymous to the quality of your website. This is why it’s truly important to follow up excellent photos with greater content.
Conclusion
Images are an integral part of any website, and choosing the right image helps the website to grab the visitor’s attention. Using vivid imagery and unique color palette may help a company portray their brand, which in turn means brand value and customer retention. By choosing a high-quality photo, knowing the purpose of the photo, using original photos and being consistent in all aspects can help a website to create a positive impression.
When you’re looking for images on the web, you’ll come across four types of licensing which may affect your usability. You may find two kinds of images – either these are free or you’d need to give a one-time payment to use the royalty-free custom stock image.
If you’re looking for exceptional images free-of-cost, you can surely try Unsplash, 500px, Rawpixel, Wikimedia Commons, Pexels and Flickr. All of these contain high-resolution images which can be used for both personal and commercial purposes.
If you want to be a bit more professional, you can try to purchase the image and reserve the licensing. You can try Getty Images, Shutterstock and Alamy to get highly professional stock images that will grab the customer’s attention.
Regardless of where you find the photo or which sources you use, you must always ensure that the photos are of high-quality and portrays the purpose in which it was intended to use. In this way, you will know how to find the right photos for your website.fairly straightforward, which is why you may not want to use the images for your business websites.
